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Demonstration at the statue of A. S. Pushkin on 5th Dec. 1976 \/ archive Mezhdunarodnii Memorial.\u00a0<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

Dates:<\/strong><\/em> December 5th, 1965; January 22th, 1967, and others<\/p>\n

Place:<\/strong> <\/em>Moscow<\/p>\n

Partecipants:<\/strong> <\/em>Aleksandr Esenin-Vol’pin, Vladimir Bukovskii, Liudmila Alekseeva, Aleksandr Ginzburg, Iurii Galanskov, Apollon Shukht, Liudmila Polikovskaia, Irina Iakir, Viktoria Vol’pina and others<\/p>\n

Description:<\/strong><\/em>
\nThe 1965 demonstration in Pushkin square was organised by the mathematician and activist Aleksandr Esenin-Vol’pin, son of one of the most important figures in Russian culture at the beginning of the 20th century, the poet Sergei Esenin, who committed suicide at the age of thirty in 1925. It took place in December 1965 in front of Pushkin\u2019s statue and is considered the founding event of the human rights movement in the USSR<\/a>.
\nThe protesters were showing their solidarity for the writers Andrei Siniavskii and Iulii Dani\u0117l’ who were on trial, having been arrested in September in 1965 after their works were published in tamizdat,<\/em> under the pseudonyms of Abram Terts and Nicolai Arzhak. Shortly afterwards Siniavskii and Dani\u0117l’ were convicted respectively to seven and five years imprisonment. Formally the trial was open to the public, but in reality, access was limited to few participants, who were carefully chosen by the Party (cf. Piretto 2001: 287). The trial, together with that of the future Nobel Prize Iosif Brodskii, labelled as a \u2018social parasite\u2019, in 1964 represented a flashpoint for social unrest. The defendants themselves were ordinary intellectuals employed in official academia, but it was not so much their role that provoked protest but the way their trial was conducted.
\nSiniavskii and Dani\u0117l’ were accused under article 70 of participating in anti-Soviet agitation and publishing anti Soviet propaganda in their works. They refused to plead guilty and engaged in surreal discussions with their accusers about the nature of their work. Siniavskii argued that it was a mistake to identify the ideas and behaviour of fictional characters with the author\u2019s opinions, who created them to pursue clear artistic intentions. Dani\u0117l’ affirmed his view of contemporary Soviet society, in which he saw a return to the cult of personality (cf. Clementi 2007: 58).
\nA demonstration was organised for December 5th, 1965, anniversary of the day the Stalinist Constitution<\/em> (which on paper guaranteed the right to demonstrate) came into force.\u00a0 According to Liudmila Alekseeva and Vladimir Bukovskii between eighty and two hundred people took part, for the most part students. The twenty-two arrested were immediately released, but were expelled from their institutes (cf. Parisi 2017: 129). The protest was defined by Esenin-Vol’pin in his Civil Appeal<\/em> as \u2018a meeting for openness\u2019 (miting glasnosti<\/em>) (cf. Esenin-Vol\u2019pin: web); in the following years it became a \u2018silent meeting\u2019 (miting molchaniia),<\/em> during which protestors gathered in front of the monument to \u2018the Sun of Russian poetry\u2019, took off their hats and stood in silence, always for less than five minutes to prevent police intervention (cf. Clementi 2007: 54).
\nFrom 1977, this annual protest took place on the 10th of December, the anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights<\/em> in 1948 (cf. ibid.<\/em>). During the Soviet period, Pushkin square was the place of at least one other protest: on January 22nd, 1967, a group of students protested against the arrests of the editors of the almanac Phoenix,<\/em> that had taken place a few days before, between January 17th and 19th. A small number of protesters holding posters with the phrase \u2018Freedom for Galanskov, Dobrovolskii, Lashkova, Radzievskii’, were stopped by members of the Komsomol and arrested (cf. Piretto 2001: 284).<\/p>\n

Federico Iocca<\/strong><\/em>
\n[30th June, 2021]\n

Translation by Diletta Bacci<\/p>\n

Bibliography<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n